I've seen it, very moving. Hope everybody who sees this post goes to see it on big screen for best effect. Stay to the very end of the credits. You should be in the spirit by then as the finals scenes justifiably go for GLORY. Great Rap anthem in the end that meshses into two great authentic movement songs in ecstasy. Great Soundtrack and is stirring hackles of George Wallace Jr in Alabama, as it should.

My sister's Sunday School class, youth group, is going Sunday afternoon in Easley, S.C. and the History Club and A/B students of my mother's Collinsville alma mater are having a special showing in Gadsden this coming Friday morning; 60 strong!

This is cinema, more rhetorical, spectacular, and stirring than cable-TV drama: again and again, DuVernay’s camera (Bradford Young did the cinematography) tracks behind characters as they march, or gentles toward them as they approach, receiving them with a friendly hand. At one point during the first march, the camera slowly rises and peers over a massive beam on the Edmund Pettus Bridge as hundreds of people advance across it. When Alabama state troopers release tear gas and charge on horseback, attacking the marchers with clubs and whips, the screen goes white from the gas, as if shrouded in terror, and the camera hurtles past marchers scrambling to get off the bridge. Many are injured, including the activist Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey). The episode, which took place on March 7, 1965—Bloody Sunday—invokes the tumultuous crowd scenes from silent Soviet classics by Eisenstein and Pudovkin. During the clashes in the White House, however, DuVernay lets the words and the actors carry the meaning. The reliably impressive Tom Wilkinson recalls, without the slightest exaggeration, L.B.J.’s looming head and neck, his heavy hands, his easy way with profanity. The icy confrontation between Johnson and Wallace—whom Roth plays as sarcastic and wily, with a lizard smile—is a minor classic in itself. Historical irony abounds in bio-pic land: our unique American heritage exists onscreen courtesy of talented British actors.

DuVernay’s timing couldn’t be more relevant. Next year marks the fiftieth anniversary of both the Selma marches and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court overturned a key provision of the act last year, and Republican legislatures across the country have been deploying new voter-I.D. laws. Faced with all that—and with the recent turmoil in Ferguson, Cleveland, and New York—King would have noticed how far we have yet to go, shaken his head, and set to work.